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Narrating fear: Presentation of the city of quito in three ecuadorian novels in the last years

Abstract:

In the present essay it is proposed to analyze how fear is built in the Quito city represented in the works Edén y Eva (2013) de Huilo Ruales; Los años perdidos (2013) de Juan Pablo Castro; y Ecuatox® (2013) de Santiago Páez, under the assumption that “it’s not the threat that creates fear, but fear which creates the threat” (Lotman). In other words, to analyze the secret relationship that links the construction of fear in the contemporary city of Quito, through the establishment of a story machine that articulates fear-generating devices, and how it controls individual and collective bodies. However, we also have to analyze the way authors stretch this “reality” in their works, through the creation/fiction of spaces, stories, and characters (lunatics, clowns, marginalized people, poets, prostitutes,…) who live in a city that resist the monological vision of power. Laughter, irony, memory, and science fiction are devices that work as counter-power’s agents of change. These practices of resistance search for the “missing city,” a dialogic, heterogeneous, multiple, and free one.